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When Did You First Realize You Couldn’t Live Without Your Smartphone?

When Did You First Realize You Couldn’t Live Without Your Smartphone?

It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Chances are you probably can’t point to a single event. Rather, the more you used your smartphone, the more you realized it could do. Before long, it had moved in and taken over your life, something they didn’t warn you about when you went to the phone shop.

Smartphones have become so essential for many of us that we literally lose it when we’re without them. Scientists have called this nomophobia, and it’s a real thing, as any of us who have left the house without our phones can attest.

Losing our smartphones is more painful than losing our wallets because at least cash and credit cards can be replaced. Smartphones contain all our memories, personal information and preferences. Losing them today is an utter disaster.

Check out these reasons why you can’t live without your smartphone.

It Helps You Look Busy When You Need It Most

If you’re in your thirties, you’ll remember a time when you couldn’t just ignore people by pretending to be busy on your phone. If you were going to ignore them, you had to think of something a lot more elaborate.

But with smartphones, life is a little less anxiety-provoking. That ex that you never want to see again? Well, thanks to smartphones, you can bury your head, pretending to catch up on Facebook, while they look on mournfully from the other side of the street.

You Rely On It For Business

Just nine years ago, smartphones were little more than a novelty, allowing you to play games and browse the internet. But in 2017, they’re much more than that: they’re your livelihood. Thanks to the rise of mobile working and the gig economy, people are coming to rely on their phones more and more just to put food in their mouths. Some people are now using their phones as a credit card swiper, literally taking payments through them as if they were a checkout in a shop.

Then there’s the fact that modern businesses are utterly dependent on social media, all of which needs to be continually managed on the go. The chances are that if you work for yourself or for another company, your phone is key to everything you do.

You Need Your Phone To Be A Better Person

Remember how on Star Trek, Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the crew aboard the Enterprise insisted that they didn’t work for money and that instead they were driven to “better themselves?” Well, smartphones are a window into that future. Here, in the world of health and education apps, our phones really do push us to be better than we are. There are so many ways we can live more healthily, more ethically and more skilfully, thanks to our phones. Apps now do everything from giving us goals to monitoring our progress to giving us a kick up the backside when we slack off. Apps are even infiltrating our kitchens, imploring us to cook meals with less fat, more fiber, and more avocados.